


another story (with a brand-new meaning)

by renquise



Category: JoJo no Kimyouna Bouken | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 16:33:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Diana Costello might have been called Hermes Costello, in another life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	another story (with a brand-new meaning)

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place after the end of Stone Ocean.

Diana couldn’t be exactly sure when it had started; it might have been around the time she first met Irene and the rest of the gang, or when she woke up one morning with Kiss sitting at her bedside, but it might have been longer than that, for all she knew.

The coffee pot was on the stove, percolating slowly, the sunlight from the window glancing off of the rising steam. She put her hand out for it, and her fingers passed through air slightly to the left of it. Diana couldn’t hear the second pot bubbling, and there was no sticker on it to rip off, no double to collapse back onto itself, and she couldn’t feel Kiss hovering over her shoulder.

“You’d better be gone by the time I look back,” she said, and she didn’t care if she was talking to coffee pots, because it was way too early for this shit. When she grabbed again for the coffee pot, there was just one solid plastic handle under her hand. 

It was nothing new, really. Yeah, there was a joke about perpetual drunken double-vision in there somewhere, but fuck you, this was different. It wasn’t an exact double—something more like seeing the vague outline of what have been in the shadow of what there was, but honestly, Diana didn’t think too hard about it.

It made things a little more challenging in the mornings, especially when you were looking for your keys and you were already late for work, or when you were trying to get a roach out from behind the fridge, but apart from that, whatever.

There was only one of her, as far as she knew, and that was what mattered.

\--

Irene came to Diana’s apartment in the middle of that fucking miserable Florida summer, the muggy air hitting Diana’s face like a wall when she opened the door—not that it was much better in the apartment, given that the air con was on the fritz and she hadn’t had the chance to swear at it until it worked.

Irene was sweating, too, a duffle bag at her feet and her hair frizzing where it stuck out of her buns. “Hey, I’m crashing your place,” she said cheerfully. “I brought pizza.”

Diana rolled her eyes. “Well, fuck, did you at least bring cold beer to go with it, you freeloader?”

Irene held up her other hand, which held a six-pack of cheap beer sweating in the sun. “Good enough for you?”

“Mi casa es su casa, in that case,” Diana said, snatching the six-pack from Irene’s fingers. “Is is Anakiss?”

Irene sighed. “Naw, it’s not him. Well, not really. It’s just—things are weird with him, okay? We decided to take a break.”

“Yeah, because that dude is kind of stalkery at the best of times?” Diana said. “Whatever, come in, crash on the couch.”

Emporio peeked out from behind Irene and gave her a small wave, saying, “Hi, Diana,” and Diana felt vaguely guilty about swearing and drinking around the kid, even though she was pretty sure Emporio had heard far worse from Irene. 

She waved Irene in and brought the pizza and the case into the kitchen, cracking two beer bottles open on the edge of the counter and putting the rest in the fridge. She seriously had to do some grocery shopping, because she was pretty sure they were down to condiment sandwiches, which Foo liked, because they were a weirdo, but that probably wasn’t enough to sustain anyone else.

“Thanks,” Irene said, throwing her bag on the couch.

“And fuck him anyways, for good measure,” Diana said, handing the beer over to Irene, who took a deep gulp from it, her throat working. “Uh, Emporio, do you want some juice or something?”

“Yes, please,” Emporio said, and Diana definitely wondered where he got to be so polite, because he probably didn’t get it from Irene. Or her. 

When she came back into her living room with a glass of orange juice scavenged from the back of the fridge, it was happening again. 

Irene was talking quietly to Emporio, her hair coming out of her buns and catching the thick summer sunlight coming in through the window, and in the humid, hot air, Diana could glimpse, as if in the corner of her eye, Irene again. Except it wasn’t quite Irene, her face slightly harder, the angles of her body more guarded. 

“Diana, you better have TLC on this thing,” Irene said, fiddling with the remote, and when Diana blinked, there was only one of her on the couch. 

“Fuck off, Jolyne. If you can’t live without Say Yes To The Dress for a couple days, you can crash on somebody else’s couch.”

Emporio was looking at her oddly.

“You okay, kid?” Diana asked after a moment, once she and Irene had found the missing battery for the remote underneath the couch cushions.

Emporio jumped a bit and shook his head, perching on the couch and sipping at his juice. Diana shrugged. Kids were weird, but she had always figured that it was best just to let them do their own thing sometimes, especially when they were as ridiculously grounded as Emporio. 

She ruffled his sweaty hair and left Irene to wrangle the TV into submission while she made them popcorn.

\--

The good thing about talking to Foo was that they were so fucking weird that nothing ever fazed them. So if you told Foo about occasionally seeing double, Foo just bit into a sandwich that, as far as Diana could tell, contained only mustard, spicy mayo, and mango chutney and very helpfully said, “You’re sure you’re not just a little nuts? There's nothing wrong with that.” 

Diana flipped them off, and Foo returned the gesture with a clueless grin. 

"It's just like--something that used to be there, but it's not fucking ghosts or anything stupid," Diana said. “It's, like, you know when you close your eyes and rub them and there's that floaty outline of what you were looking at? Like that.”

“Right,” Foo said. “Do you have any cheez whiz?”

“You ate it all last time with the last of the chocolate chip cookies, you asshole,” Diana said. “But it's like, not there all the time or anything. Just sometimes.”

“Oh, right.” Foo chewed speculatively on the sandwich, catching the spilloff of mayo and chutney and licking it off their fingers. Whether they were actually thinking about Diana's thing or considering what condiment would best replace cheez whiz in a breakfast sandwich was anyone's guess. “Maybe you have 5-D vision or something. That would be pretty cool.”

Emporio wandered into the kitchen in his pyjamas, standing on tiptoe to pull a glass out of the cupboard and pour himself a glass of water. 

“Morning, kid,” Diana said, and Foo gave him a half-wave, occupied with their breakfast condiment sandwiches. 

Emporio gave a sleepy hello before fishing eggs out of the refrigerator and boosting up on his toes to reach the pan hanging by the stove. Diana stood up and snagged it for him, thinking that she should put those someplace lower—the kid liked to cook, and was probably better at it than either her or Irene, really. Not that it was hard, given that Diana’s entire cooking repertoire consisted of “cheapass Chinese food from the place down the street” and “meals that could be heated up in five minutes in the microwave” and “some bastardization of congri that would make her mamà weep bitter tears of disappointment.” She was getting better at it, though. Really. 

She ruffled his hair. “Whatcha got for us there, kid?”

Emporio shrugged. “Scrambled eggs.”

“Sounds good,” she said. She usually wasn’t good with kids, but she got along fine with Emporio. Emporio was the gravest little kid she had ever met, all serious eyes under the brim of his baseball cap, already grown-up when she had met him on the highway, along with Irene and Anakiss and Report. (Foo came later, doing their thesis in god knows what at the same college as Diana.) Diana liked Emporio a lot, but he made her weirdly sad sometimes. She wanted to encourage him to not be such a tiny adult all the time and to do terrible, irresponsible things sometimes, like punch out a kid or something. (Diana had first put her fist in someone’s face in kindergarten. Yeah, she probably wasn’t the greatest example.) 

He seemed like he’d seen some serious shit for his age, and Diana didn’t pity him, fuck no, but she couldn’t help but feel a little protective of him, especially when Irene got that soft look in her eyes when she brushed the kid’s hair. 

It seemed like that flickering double vision never caught on him; it was always just Emporio, quiet and serious and sure. 

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll go wake up Jolyne so we can eat. If any of the eggs have gone bad, we can put them in my annoying neighbour’s mailbox. Or maybe in Annasui’s.”

Emporio went really quiet, staring at the eggs in the pan. They snapped as they cooked, and Hermes thought it was a fucking shame that they didn’t have any bacon to go with it. 

“Jolyne?” he said, after poking at the eggs a bit. 

“Yeah, Jolyne,” Hermes said. “That girl stuck in bed who isn’t going to get any breakfast if she doesn’t wake up soon?”

“Oh,” Emporio said. “Right. Yeah.”

Diana opened her mouth to ask if the kid was feeling okay, but he just looked thoughtful. She shrugged and went into the bedroom, stepping over the sheets that had gotten kicked off the bed at some point during the night. Irene was sprawled over most of her bed—Emporio was all set up on the fold-out couch in living room, and Diana had decided that fuck, her bed was big enough for both her and Irene, and she wasn’t going to sleep on the floor of her own place. Over the past couple of days, Diana had woken up in the morning with her arm curled around Irene, because they were apparently both octopus sleepers intent on crushing someone else in their sleep. 

It was kind of nice to wake up like that. It had been awhile since Diana's last girlfriend had walked out on her, saying that Diana just didn't trust her, wasn't letting her in, and Irene was solid and warm and apparently didn't mind her shit.

Diana put her hand on Irene's shoulder to shake her awake. Irene’s skin was sun-warm and kind of sweaty under her hand, her tank top rucked up over her belly, and all of a sudden, Diana wanted to run her hand over the sweet dip of her waist. Maybe push her hand into her boxer shorts and spread her fingers over her hip. Jolyne was pretty much the opposite of delicate, and Hermes liked her that way, liked her broad back and her tattoos ringing the muscles of her arm, but she seemed softer in the morning, her hair spread over Hermes’s cheap pillowcase and her mouth open. 

It wasn’t until she shook Jolyne awake—well, shook her a bit and then poked her in the ribs and escalated to tugging the sheets off of her when Irene just curled up tighter and muttered something that sounded like “mffffffuckoff”—that she realized what Emporio had been saying. 

Thing was, it felt just as right in her mouth as “Irene” did. Maybe a little different, “Jolyne” a little firmer than “Irene,” but they both worked. 

It was enough to make her pull her hands back, the beginnings of that weird ache pulsing in the back of her eyes when the world separated into two, but then Irene punched her arm and gave her a half-hearted glare as she rolled up out of bed.

“I'm up, I'm up. God, I hate you morning people,” Irene grumbled, scratching at her stomach beneath the tank top she'd borrowed from Diana. Diana blinked, and the pressure was gone, and there was just Irene pulling some shorts on and the lazy roll of her feet against the floorboards as she wandered out of the room and snuck up on Emporio to tickle his sides.

“You know, we could get a second bed,” Diana said over HGTV commercials when they were all eating plates of scrambled eggs on the couch.

“For Emporio? Yeah, poor dude, the couch can't be comfortable, hey?” Irene leaned over and nudged Emporio. “Great eggs, by the way. My dad's really good at eggs, but I've never really asked him what he does to them.”

Diana rolled her eyes. “I mean a second bed for you, too, jesus.” 

Irene rocked back on the couch. “Baby, no, don't tell me the honeymoon period is already over. We can put the spark back into it, I swear. I'll bring you flowers next time I come back from work!” She grinned and slung her foot up onto the couch to stroke Diana's thigh.

Diana flipped her off cheerfully, shoving her foot off the couch.

\--

Diana eventually conviced Foo to lend them their truck to wrangle Emporio's bed over from Anakiss and Irene's apartment, and jesus fuck, that little Ikea bed shouldn't have been nearly as hard to shove down the staircase as it ended up being. They got it, though, even if they had to take a couple of legs off just to get around the last corner, which Foo did enthusiastically. Diana was pretty sure they could be reattached by mostly conventional means. Anakiss was pretty much completely fucking useless, being way too busy staring adoringly at Irene.

They finally got the bed into the flatbed of the truck and gave each other a high-five. Irene yanked the hem of her tanktop up to wipe her forehead. “Fuck it, I guess my old bed is staying in storage forever, because fuck if I'm tackling the stairs again. Get used to me drooling all over your pillows, Costello.” 

Irene's stomach was flat and muscled, the edge of her sports bra barely visible. It wasn't like Diana had never seen that shit before, given that yeah, both of them were pretty much constitutionally opposed to pants in the morning, never mind shirts, but there was something about that flash of belly that made Diana stare a bit. 

Foo poked her in the ribs, then, and Diana had to retaliate by putting Foo in a headlock.

Anakiss came over to Irene's side of the car and said something to her when Diana turned over the reluctant engine, low enough that Diana couldn't hear it. Irene said something back, and leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. 

It wasn't that Diana hated Anakiss or anything. Diana almost felt bad for the guy, because he had it so fucking bad, and Irene just didn’t notice, really. Granted, he was also kind of a crazy bastard, but it would be just plain lying to say that people hadn't called her a crazy bitch more than once, so who was she to judge. 

“Why'd you start going out with Anakiss, anyways?” Diana said once they were on the freeway, aiming for casual and missing by a fucking mile.

Irene stuck her hand out the window, riding the air current. She shrugged. “I guess it's kind of hard to turn down a guy who likes you that much, you know? He's not a bad dude, but man, I don't know. ” She grinned. “Gives pretty great head, though.”

Diana snorted. “Plenty other people out there who do, man.”

“I thought I might marry him, once,” Irene said. She looked thoughtful. A little distant, almost. “It just seemed the thing to do, you know? That, and I felt really bad about totally fucking up his proposal. Accidentally chucked his ring out the car window at an alligator.” 

“Fucking alligators,” Diana said. She frowned. Fuck, why did that sound so familiar? “Wait, you've totally told me this story before, with the alligators and shit?”

Irene laughed. “Probably. Come on, let's go pick up Emporio from school. Kid'll be glad not to have to sleep on your lumpy-ass couch anymore.”

“Right.”

It was easy, was the thing. It was one thing to be friends with someone, but totally another to live with them, and Diana had had enough shitty roommates to know. But Irene fit into her dinky apartment like a well-worn pair of jeans, and Diana doesn’t even notice the slow creep of Irene’s things into her own, her toothbrush by Diana’s in the bathroom or her hair products gradually taking over the shelves.

Diana's sister called her that day, asking, so, chica, find anyone in the big city, how's the whole grad school thing going, do you need anything, and Diana didn't know how to tell her that she was happy. Really happy. She was pretty sure her sister knew anyways. 

\--

“Hey, let’s go to Cape Canaveral,” Diana said over breakfast one day.

Irene raised her eyebrows at her over her coffee mug. "Diana, are you a secret space geek? Oh my god, that's adorable.”

Diana punched her arm, because fuck you, no, space wasn't her thing, but she hadn't ever been to the place, even though it wasn't that far away. It just seemed like the thing to do. Mamà had mentioned it once when Diana was little, but everyone was busy with the restaurant, and they really didn't get the chance to get away much.

They borrowed Foo's truck again and packed a picnic lunch and everything, and Irene even drove like a halfway normal person, probably because Emporio was sitting in the backseat and occasionally leaning over Irene's shoulder to say, um, hey, I'm pretty sure you should have turned your turning signal on, Mom. 

Emporio went back to looking out the window, and Irene leaned over to Diana to whisper delightedly, did he just call me _mom_ , and Diana's heart just about exploded, because jesus, that was cute. And because Irene then nearly back-ended the dude in front of them.

They made it there in one piece, though, and forget Diana, Irene was totally the secret space geek, gawping at all the cool space shit, Emporio up on her shoulders. Diana had to remind them to put on sunscreen so that they didn't burn to a crisp. It was a wholesome family outing, and that was weird as shit, because Diana sure as hell didn't do wholesome, and sure, Irene and Emporio were family, but Diana hadn't realized that they were, well. Her family. Their family.

It was all great until they got to the space shuttle.

The shuttle was the shuttle, like she had seen on TV before, maybe more battered-looking than she might have expected-- it almost weird to consider that thing in front of her had gone up into space and come back down.

And then, between one breath and the next, it was like the world tilted crazily around her, and everything was too fast, like a tape on fast forward. 

Like reality coming apart at its seams. 

She tasted bile in her mouth, and she was going to throw up. 

She knew, bone-deep: this was where she had died. Would die? Her sister had died, and she had died, and Jolyne had died, and she was pretty fucking sure it was for something important.

She sat down on the curb and put her head between her legs, and there was Jolyne at her side, her voice sounding distant, saying, Hermes, fuck, you okay, hold on, I'll get you some water, fuck. 

Hermes couldn't breathe, couldn't get the muggy air into her lungs, not until she remembered, no, she wasn't dead, she wasn't going to be dead anytime soon if she had anything to say about it.

The grey edges faded back, and there was just the usual bustle of tourists, kids shouting, and Jolyne's hands on her shoulders, Stone Free hanging over her shoulder, and Emporio sitting beside her, hand hovering over her arm.

Jolyne lifted Hermes's chin in her hand, looking into her eyes. There was a crease in Jolyne's forehead. “Hey. You doing all right?”

“Hey. I'm fine, I'm fine, sorry,” Hermes said sheepishly. “Guess I didn't drink enough water or something.”

“Don't scare me like that, you asshole,” Jolyne said, her hand slipping back into Hermes's dreads and grasping them to shake her head lightly. Jolyne put her hands on Hermes's shoulders when Hermes moved to stand up again. “No, you're sitting here for a little longer, okay?”

Hermes laughed, shrugging Jolyne's hands off. “Jesus, I'm fine. Just lasted a second, that's all.” Jolyne didn't seem convinced, but Hermes took her wrist and squeezed it. “I'm fine, Jolyne, swear to god.”

“Still. Stay there, I'm going to get you something.” 

Emporio was really quiet. Jolyne went off to get more bottles of water, and Emporio still didn't say anything. The two of them sat together, watching the families out on vacation, the breeze swaying through the palm trees.

“Are you okay, now?” Emporio asked. Diana sometimes felt like taking him by the shoulders and shaking him lightly, to say that he was just a kid, and he shouldn't have to worry about grown-ups. 

“Don't you worry about me, kid. Let's go find Irene, okay?”

Emporio stood up. 

“Can we go see the shuttle, please?” he said, very carefully and very tentatively.

Diana's mouth went dry. "Sure."

There was no reason for Diana to be nervous about a fucking shuttle. Emporio slipped his small hand into hers as they wove through the crowds, and Diana couldn't tell if it was for him, or for her. 

Diana didn't pass out again, thank fuck. Sure, things were kind of tilty and there was definitely a second, shadowy shuttle that seemed way less motionless than the one in front of them, but it was fine. Emporio looked at the shuttle, and at her. 

He opened his mouth to say something, but changed his mind, or something, because he shook his head and squeezed her hand. 

On the way back, the road was almost empty—nothing but the strange, lonely meeting of headlights passing in the night and disappearing again into the darkness. Emporio fell asleep in the backseat, his breathing quiet. Irene started nodding off, too, her head leaning against the window, and Diana turned the radio down low to an indistinct murmur. 

The headlights through the windshield cast over Irene as they passed by, and if they occasionally made her look like a very familiar stranger, it passed with the light slipping off silently as the cars passed them and sped away.

\--

It was a lazy Saturday morning and Irene was out doing groceries when Emporio asked her about it. 

“Diana,” Emporio said gravely. “You can see bits of it, can't you?” 

Diana sat down next to him. “Kid, seriously, you don't have to worry about me. You've got enough things on your plate, right? How's school going?” 

Emporio ignored her last-ditch attempt to bring this conversation back to somewhere halfway normal.

“Can I show you something?” he said. He looked determined, and sure, Emporio wasn't like most kids, but if Diana knew anything about kids, it was that they weren't put off by a simple refusal.

Emporio took her hand and pulled her around the corner of the shelving in the living room.

There wasn’t any space there, she knew. She had barely manged to shove the shelving in here past the sofa when she had moved in, and it still stuck out to block part of the window, but fuck, it fit, and she wasn’t an interior designer. Point was, there was barely enough space to slide a couple of the tv cords behind it, and there really, really wasn’t a whole fucking room behind it, especially not a fancy-ass yuppie apartment.

“The fuck?” Diana said, because really, what did you say to shit like that.

“It's not really there—it doesn’t exist anymore, not really,” Emporio said, as if this was a comforting thing. “It belongs to another—another time, I guess.” 

“Yeah?” The room looked solid as anything, and when Diana put her hand out to rest on the place that had her crappy-ass TV on the Ikea shelf that she and Irene had built together to replace the crates that had been holding it up before, there was a doily-covered dresser under her hand instead, the doily delicate and the threads distinct under her fingers.

“I—well, I find places, things that don’t exist anymore because they got destroyed. And that whole world doesn’t exist anymore, now, I guess. It’s complicated. I don’t know if I understand it myself.” Emporio looked around at the room, like it was a familiar, sad thing, like an empty chair at a table.

“What happened?” Diana asked, morbidly curious. She didn’t really want to know, but it felt like someone should ask, someone should remember. It sounded crazy, but who was she to say otherwise, when she was seeing ghosts from a dead reality. She had always vaguely wondered if the kid had a stand, but she hadn't expected it to be this fucked-up.

“You all died,” Emporio said. “You saved the world and made it this, though. Saved me.” He sounded so fucking sad, and Diana just wanted to shrug and say that they were here now, so it didn’t really matter, did it? “I don’t know why you’re seeing it, but it might be because of your stand.”

“Did you ever tell Irene this?” Diana said, putting her feet up on the table from another reality. “She’s smart. She’s got to have figured out part of it.”

“No,” Emporio said. He fidgeted. 

Diana had always been fucking awkward with hugs, but the kid looked like he needed one, and what kind of crap adult-type figure would she be if she didn't give him one. He accepted it, but didn't hold on long. 

“Kid, it’s fine. It’s not going to change anything. We won't just up and disappear because we're weirdo reincarnations of other people or something,” Diana said.

“Yeah,” Emporio said. He still didn't look sure. 

“Come on, show us on out. Whatever yuppie dude was living here is going to wonder who left tracks on his white sofa. Seriously, who is dumb enough to get a white sofa, anyways?”

When Emporio took her hand and led her out, he still looked off-balance, unsure, but also like some weight had been taken off his shoulders. Seriously, how fucked-up was it for one kid to think that he held the only memory of a dead world? Diana ruffled his hair. 

“Come on, let's order pizza for dinner. Irene should be home soon, huh? Good thing she isn't here to order, because she'd totally make us get pineapple on half of it,” Diana said. 'Jolyne' was so close to her tongue, the shape of it way too natural, and Diana bit it back and fit it into 'Irene', because Emporio was right there, waiting for her to come back with him. 

They got pineapple on it anyways, because Diana was way too indulgent of Irene's weird tastes.

\--

For a long time, nothing. Okay, sure, it was weird to know that you were some kind of reincarnation of another you in another world, but you kind of forgot about things that were so fucking strange that you couldn't really think of them as real. The stupid, everyday things muffled them, and you couldn't think too hard about alternate universes and twists of reality when you were busy trying to deal with asshole customers and finding spelling errors in your thesis draft and fixing the leaky sink and making sure you remembered to pick up your kid from school.

The doubles were still there, but Diana would be lying if she said that she wasn't used to them by now.

Emporio looked more relaxed, a little more settled, and even went as far as to be a pain in the ass once or twice, the way kids should be.

And one day, she woke up next to Irene and her arm was over Irene’s waist, and it was still dark outside except for the streetlight shining through the cracks of the blinds, and she couldn’t tell what was real, because everything—everything was doubled, and she felt like she needed to throw up. 

Kiss’s hand hovered over hers in a sudden desire to put her stickers on everything and see if ripping them off would bring everything back to normal. If there was a normal, and not just some thin sheen of reality overlaid on something else. 

She had to be in her apartment, could hear the honking in the street and the usual low humming of Miami around her, familiar like a second skin, but she couldn’t see it, could only see the concrete walls of a room even smaller than her dinky bedroom, and the clanking of a gate out in the street that had to be the sound of a cell closing. Her tank top was soaked with cold sweat. Not the sticky sweat of summer nights, but a clammy, sick sheen of moisture that sent convulsive shivers up her back.

She couldn’t breathe. 

Couldn’t tell if the air she was gasping in belonged to this plane or another.

Jolyne shifted in her sleep under Hermes’s arm, and Diana closed her eyes, tried to focus on the curve of Irene’s waist under her arm, the warm sweat on her skin, the light sheets over them both. 

“Diana?” Jolyne said, her voice thick with sleep. 

Hermes sat up, raked her hands back through her dreads and felt the muggy breeze drifting in through the window and on the back of her neck. She heard the cheap covers shifting together, and then felt Jolyne—Irene’s strong arm around her shoulders, hugging her tight. But when she opened her eyes, there were still bars and concrete, the smell of sweat and piss hanging in her sinuses. 

“I. Fuck. I’m going to take a shower. Go back to sleep,” she said, more harshly than she meant. Irene just hugged her tighter, and Diana stared hard at the peeling paint at the corner of her room that she had been meaning to redo it since she had moved in, at the linoleum in the bathroom across the hall that was lifting a bit with the humidity, at everything that defined this, here, now.

Diana pressed her hands into her eyes. She didn’t want this, didn’t want the what-if of another universe pressing in on her eyeballs and on her life. 

Irene wrapped her fingers around Diana’s wrists, and her hands were strong and made for holding things together.

“Hey,” Jolyne said. Her eyes had the kind of determined fire that had made Hermes follow her to the end of the fucking world, and she looked so determined to make things right, so fucking brave, that Hermes had to lean forward and kiss her.

“Your name was Jolyne,” Diana said against her lips, and she hated how desperate she sounded. “Keep me here?” 

Jolyne—Irene—whoever she was in that moment—looked uncertain for a moment. She kissed Diana gently, softly. Her grip around Diana’s wrists shifted, and Diana realized that her fingers were unravelling, the strings gently pulling Diana’s arms together in front of her chest.

“Like this?” Irene asked, when Diana’s wrists were cinched tight. 

“Kinky,” she said, but it was weak, and they both knew it. 

Irene was so fucking careful, pressing Diana’s fingers and checking that the circulation was all right, cupping Diana's joined hands in the hand that wasn't coiled around Diana's wrists. Her bangs hung down, hiding her face when she kissed Diana's knuckles, her lips soft and dry.

It felt good, felt right to have Irene’s ropes around her skin. Diana wondered what Irene felt when she took herself apart, what the strands of her muscle and skin could feel. It had to be fucking weird to unravel yourself. When she squirmed against the ropes, Irene straightened her spine, her cheeks going red, like she can feel every shift of the ropes against Diana’s skin.

“Oh,” Irene said. “Fuck, that’s weird. But it feels—“ She gestured in the air, to Stone Free at her side and then to her chest, and shrugged sheepishly. “Good.”

Diana snorted. “Yeah, good is a word for your creepy flesh strings,” she said, and Irene punched her in the arm, lightly, which was totally unfair, because Diana couldn’t punch her back. Diana got it, though—there was a kind of indefinable rightness that came with it, like a body part or a sense that you always knew you had, even when you hadn’t. 

“Can you feel that?” Diana said, lifting her joined wrists to her mouth and kissing them.

“Fuck,” Irene said, her teeth digging into her lip on the beginning of the word and her chin tipping back on a shudder. “Uh, yeah. But—let me take care of you, okay?”

This was usually the point where Diana protested that fuck no, she wasn't someone to be taken care of, but here, now, in Irene's hands—it was all right. She leaned into Irene, and Irene smiled and just said, “We've got to stay quiet—Emporio is sleeping.”

Irene let her hands go carefully, but kissed her hard, teeth and lips and determination, and Diana was happy about that, because she wouldn’t be able to take pity from her. Irene wrapped one arm around her, keeping her close, and tugged down on the waist of Diana’s sweatpants, her broad palm pressing between her legs. 

“Hey,” Irene said, or maybe Jolyne, and Diana didn’t fucking know anymore, but there was only one of her, only one of her wrapped around Diana's limbs and keeping her here, tying her to this place. 

“Come on, give me more, I can take it—I want it,” Diana said, and Irene and pushed her fingers inside her, her thumb a steady pressure on Diana’s clit, and Diana felt all her breath rush out of her on a long, low gasp.

Diana kicked the leg of her sweatpants off all the way and spread her legs around Irene, coiling a leg around her, keeping her close, and clutched at Irene's t-shirt and pulled at the neck to suck a bruise into Irene's collarbone, which made Irene swear and her fingers stutter inside Diana, and god, fuck, it was good. 

It didn’t take long for Diana to come, gasping against Irene's throat, not one of those earth-shattering white-out orgasms, but the kind where it was a release, where everything seemed to settle into place, and everything was right, for those couple of seconds. 

It took Diana a few tries, but eventually, she opened her eyes, and there was only one of everything. The strands of Irene's skin uncoiled themselves from her wrists, whispery and soft in the dark.

“You okay?” Irene said, her head propped up on her hand. She had her arm around Diana's back, petting her back in long strokes. 

“Yeah,” Diana said. “Yeah.” She kissed Irene again, and then got on her knees to slide Irene’s pants down, because she needed to put her mouth between Irene’s thighs. 

“You don’t have to—“

Diana rolled her eyes, tugging down on Irene’s underwear. “I want to, you dumbass.” 

Irene grinned at that. “Don’t let me stop you, then.”

Her sister had always told her, chica, you gotta take what you want for yourself, hide it wherever you can, hold it tight, you hear me? Diana was used to fighting for herself, to do whatever was necessary to make her life fucking work. It felt good, felt right to uncurl her hands from her fists, her fingers cramped, stiff, and to drape her arm loosely over Irene. It felt right.

They made nachos after that and ate them on the couch while watching crappy TV. Kiss hung over her shoulder, its presence weirdly comforting, as usual, and Irene had a string of cheese stuck to her chin and didn’t cover her mouth when she laughed, and Diana thought that she might be in love.

\--

The doubles still overlapped, sometimes. Sometimes, Irene had harder eyes and tattoos around her arm, and sometimes, Foo was strange and alien and didn’t understand humans, and sometimes, Anakiss and Report weren’t quite who they should be. Sometimes, Emporio looked at her, and it seemed like he was seeing someone else, another Diana, who probably fucked up in different ways and fought her way out of those, too. 

Emporio said that this world was better, and Diana wanted to believe him. Did believe him, especially when she came home from her crappy job and heard Irene clattering around in the kitchen, putting groceries in the fridge and calling, hey, welcome home. 

“Do you think we’ll ever save the world again?” she asked Irene at one point. They were watching a dumb action movie, the kind where they ended up throwing popcorn at the screen and Emporio sighed and no doubt resigned himself to being the most mature in the room before putting himself to bed. Diana was pretty sure that she and Irene had no business raising a kid, let alone one as good as Emporio, but they did their best. 

Irene ate another chip and passed them over to her. She had saran wrap on her head to cover her bangs, since Diana had just helped her put green dye on them, and looked pretty fucking ridiculous right now. 

“My dad once said that stand users were drawn together, that it came to you, whether you like it or not. You should hear the crazy stories he tells about this one trip he took with Great-Grandad Joe,” she said thoughtfully. 

Diana felt something glad in her chest when Irene talked about her dad offhandedly, like he was a comfortable fixture in her life, and Diana didn’t quite know why. She got along with the guy all right, even though he was kind of an inscrutable dude, and she wasn’t sure if he knew that his daughter was living with her yet, but she wasn’t super-attached to the guy or anything. It just seemed right, is all.

“So you’re saying that we’ll probably get weirdos showing up on our doorstep and probably threatening to destroy the world in some way. Or maybe crashing on the couch,” Diana said. She poked Irene with her foot.

“Yep.” Irene grinned at her. She put her feet up in Diana’s lap, and Diana made a token effort to get them off before sighing and pushing her thumbs into the arch of Irene’s foot. Irene purred happily. “And staying, and taking over the bedroom, too. They sometimes bring beer, though. ”

Diana snorted. “Well, the room's taken now, so they'll just have to sleep in the kitchen, or something.”

Irene ducked her head and smiled, the flicker of the tv screen reflecting off her face. It was a small, soft smile, the kind that Emporio pulled out of her. “Good.” 

Diana rubbed her thumb around the strong spur of her ankle, steady and sure. “Yeah,” Diana said. “It's good.”


End file.
